“Lament From Epirus” – Christopher King

by richibi

though you’ll have to actively listen to Christopher Kingrather than merely hear him here, as you might have been doing with many of my suggested musical pieces, should you be at all interested in the history of music, he is fascinating, dates his investigations back millenniato very Epirus, Ancient, nearly primordial, Greece, to mirologia there, ancient funerary chants

some have survived, and have been recorded for posterity, one, in 1926,by a Greek exile fled to New York City,Alexis Zoumbas, a year later, however improbably, by an American, a blind man, his own story inspirational, akin to thatofEpictetus, one of the two iconic Stoic philosophers, the other,incidentally, an emperor, though the blind man here, Willie Johnson, was never himself a slave, butonly, by a historical whisker, the emancipations of the American Civil War

Christopher King‘s comparisonof an Epirotic miralogi with an American one brings up, for me,the difference between Mozart and Beethoven, notice how theWillie Johnson version is morerhythmic, the cadence is much more pronounced than in the Greek one, Johnson would’vegot that from the musical traditions Europeans had brought over from their native continent, probably also fromAfrica, Africans

Beethoven would’ve been surrounded, meanwhile, by Roma,perhaps called gypsies then, their music ever resonant in his culture, not to mention later Liszt‘s, and the Johann Strausses’ even, for that matter, Paganini also seems to have been imbued with it, it having come up from Epirus through, notably, Hungary – not to mention, later still, that music’s influence, and I’ll stop there, onlate 19th-Century Brahms

Christopher King, incidentally,sounds a lot like someone you already know, I think,from his eschewing – Gesundheit – cell phones, for instance, to his enduring preoccupation with death, not to mention his endearing modesty, indeed his humility, his easy self-deprecation, despite his,dare I say, incontestable, and delightful, erudition